Chocolate Chip Cookies

So delicious! Friends and colleagues loved me for baking (and sharing!) these, but if I remember well they don't hold well for more than a few days (they don't need to, anyway).

Edited 30 November 2012: I was about to make the recipe from Ad Hoc At Home when I discovered that they were actually nearly identical. Keller uses dark brown sugar instead of golden, as well as a 1/4 cup extra sugar, and two kinds of chocolate instead of one, and again just a bit more chocolate than this recipe does. Yet, all in all they are surprisingly similar. And I'm still a big fan!

One remark: Unless you want plate-sized cookies, two tablespoons of dough is much too much. Even one tablespoon makes saucer-sized cookies - a teaspoon full is what you need for a 'normal'-sized cookie. I made just one sheet of cookies and froze the rest - I used ice trays to be able to freeze them in small portions so that next time I need them, I can bake them immediately. Silicone works best, if your ice tray is made from plastic you might have to carefully hold the back under hot running water.

We baked some of the frozen ones today (1 Dec, one day later). We probably got them out some 20 minutes or so before we placed them in the oven, and we baked them for 20 minutes at 160C - they ended up being very crisp, next time we'll start checking after 15 minutes. You can also bake while frozen, just adjust the baking time; also, they might turn out a tiny bit less flat (but just as delicious).

Frozen, they had the shape of heart (I used an ice cube tray similar to this one), but the cookies ended up being normal circles. Now I'm really curious to find out what would work - placing the dough in a cookie cutter maybe?

Edited 11 July 2014: I made the cookies using orange M&M's, as a token of consolation for DH - for times like these, you'll need chocolate in some form, right? A great success with him and his colleagues.

Next time, I would not just mix in the M&M's with the dough and then spoon the dough on the baking sheet; it's actually easier if you place blobs of cookie dough on the baking sheet first and then add the M&M's afterwards. This way the M&M's will be nice and visible (see photo, I had already mixed them, then tried to scratch the dough off the surface of the M&M's).

Also, if you're using several colours, working this way means you can much easier ensure that each cookie will contain all the colours you want. I.e. if you striving for black(brown)-red-yellow, you wouldn't want to end up with red-yellow-red, would you (gasp!)? Look out for the winner's edition on Monday (hint: there's no such thing as light blue and white M&M's...).